Usually the biggest indication is cutting salary and benefits, I'm including not giving raises as a salary cut. Cutting vacation days is definitely a salary cut.
Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health?
51–60 of 197 posts
Re: Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health?
#52Make friends with whoever does accounts payable. In many companies, paying vendors later than agreed terms would be the first sign of trouble. Companies will often do that before anything directly visible to employees.
Re: Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health?
#53I do a simple version of a balanced scorecard:
1) Financial/Stakeholders - Are we raking in revenue? What type of revenue (high-touch, low-touch. high-volume/low-margin or low-volume/high-margin)? Are we consistently making this or is it totally dependent on the connections of 1-2 people? Can it be recreated? A bad sign is if people are being shifted to different projects all the time without one being totally completed/closed.
2) Customer/External Relationships - #1 is dependent on this. You can't make money with people giving you money. Do we have sufficient customers/market to provide the type of revenue needed? Do customers like us? What's the market feedback? A bad sign is if sales is overcommitting through the teeth about the products/services just to get them onboard.
3) Activities/Internal processes - #2 is dependent on this. You cant continually create things to sell and build customer relationships without a proper cycle of operations. Do we have processes? Does the process last long enough to get feedback? Or are the activities fickle and do not have solid implementations? A fishy sign is if there seems to be a totally new sales/engineering process every month, or isn't implemented rigidly and the org chart changes every 2 quarters.
4) Learning and growth (People-aspect) - Most important. #1, #2, #3 is dependent on this. You can't have processes/services/products without people. Based on the product/value that the company is providing to customers, are they valuing the people that creates this value? (training, leadership roles, ownership of product/services, etc.). Is there career growth for people that create this value? A fishy example would be: leadership positions in a product-based tech startup where there isn't at least one person with a history of software-engineering/operations and is instead filled with a group of salesmen. That startup would probably best be a consulting business, since the way things would be led hampers any kind of effort in building an effective product development pipeline/operation. Another bad sign for that type of startup is when key staff engineers are leaving, their positions are left empty and more managers are hired instead.
Re: Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health?
#54One simple thing missing in most of these replies: ask questions. Ask your boss, ask your peers, ask the CEO now and then.
- How is the company doing against its goals for the year?
- What does our runway look like?
- What signs of product success are we expecting? What are we seeing?
In the responses, be wary of blithe positivity more than bad news. Bad news is normal; a healthy organization learns from it and improves. Optimism disconnected from reality is either an attempt to mislead you or a sign of blindness to results.
Re: Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health?
#55If you find yourself asking questions like this, that's a sign something might be awry.
Re: Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health?
#56If you can't get a straight answer from your manager, or your manager doesn't know, then the company isn't healthy.
Managers (a) love to brag about success and (b) it's their job to retain you, and part of retention is informing you about the company's financials.
It's totally okay to ask questions like 'how long can we survive if we don't grow' and 'how long does this continue before we close our doors or fire people'.
The good news is if you don't know about the health of the company you're probably too junior to be first on the chopping block.
If you're asking the harder question of 'are we going to be #3 in our sector in 5 years', you can't trust your managers on that one. They're too optimistic. Do serious competitive market research like you'd do when starting a company -- find a way to measure comparative sales, marketing activity, team strength. Read the linkedin pages of the leadership and key players and look for missing skillsets.
Re: Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health?
#57My company's CEO says he looks at the survey answers to "Would you recommend Company X as a good place to work" as a health indicator of how the company's doing. Which makes sense to me, since if the employees overall would recommend it as a place to work, it's probably reasonably stable and rewarding, has reasonably trusted managers, etc. I've never delved deep into actual statistics on this, though, so consider thi…
This is basically called Net Promoter Score or NPS. Often people use it for products and it's not a bad method for understanding how a company is doing from employees perspective.
Re: Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
How often do salary reviews generally occur for someone working as a developer (or IT I suppose?)
Usually once or twice a year for a seasoned developer, more frequent for jrs. That's been my experience.
I've been at my current position for about ~1.5 years almost without one (I think they are starting to do them soon?). Last time I asked they had said they are implementing a formal process for them.
I've just been looking forward to it.
Re: Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health?
#59I've read that a good way to get an early indicator of future health is to pay attention to the spending on the small things. Does your company have paid lunches? Does it have a snack vending machine or something similar? A coffee machine with k-cups? Other little perks that seem insignificant but are nice to have. If these things start to go away, the company is experiencing financial stress.
However, if these things never were there in the first place, it just means that you're not in the SV bubble.
Yeah, here in St Paul, we get only coffee paid for and we're quite healthy, I think. Not everywhere gets a smorgasbord of free food and snacks and I'm not convinced it's a worthwhile expense.
Re: Ask HN: As an employee of a company, how do you assess its health?
#60Simple answer: Any startup that isn't profitable isn't healthy.
More importantly, any company that has negative marginal profit, is definitely not healthy (i.e. Uber)